2Samuel
What a powerful metaphor! And it expresses so beautifully what I feel about how God has changed my life. For a long time, I was writing the book of my life. I was planning, and hoping, and intending and working hard to achieve all the things I wanted. Then I hit a patch where nothing was right, nothing was working, and I felt so hopeless about my life. I had done a lot of therapy, and that was very valuable, but I knew it couldn’t save me in the way I needed to be saved. I had been a faithful church goer as a child, and fallen away, as many do, during college. I had tasted of Eastern spiritual traditions, and while I find a lot of wisdom there, and useful ideas, they didn’t satisfy my heart. It was Ash Wednesday 25 years ago when I stumbled into a church near where I lived, and fell on my knees before God and asked Jesus to take my life, please! I realized how inadequate I was to the job, how I was being led by all sorts of grandiose notions of who I was supposed to be and how I was supposed to be, I had bought into the achievement oriented, success oriented, I’m-in-charge-of-my-life ideology of the modern world, the self sufficiency model I was raised with, and I was totally and miserably failing at it. I had no work, no relationship, and I felt utterly bereft.
So I returned to church, I began focusing my practices on the God and Jesus I knew as a child, only with the understanding of an adult. I became part of my church community. I gave my life to God to do with as God wished and found myself so blessed as a result. God has not shielded me from adversity: I quickly found that the Presence of God in my life would not spare me from difficulty, but that Divine Presence enabled me to face my difficulties squarely, with (I hope) grace and dignity. And it has been an ongoing journey since that time, continually opening out in new ways. The peace I have found comes at least in part from knowing that if I don’t get what it is I think I want, then I can rest assured that God has something better in store for me, a better and more fulfilling use of who I am than I have the ability to imagine for myself.
Prayer: Dear God, Twenty five years ago, I abandoned myself to you, and you have been my rock, my living water, my life’s bread ever since. As I move forward into yet another bend in the road, another stage of the journey, I ask for your presence to guide and inspire me, to remind me of your companionship as I travel onward, that I might be led in your paths to fulfill your calling by the gift of your grace. Amen
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